Stepmother called Meika spoiled: tape
Marie Magoon told her commonlaw husband Spencer Jordan a week after his daughter Meika Jordan died from severe head and internal injuries that the sixyearold girl had essentially been a spoiled brat.
Still, the couple said in a police - intercepted conversation at their home on Nov. 21, 2011, just after Child and Family Services interviewed them regarding their other children, that as frustrating as it was dealing with the girl they did not kill her. “We didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong,” Magoon told Jordan. “The ( three) boys have nothing wrong with them, not a thing. So how could we have done that to Meika? It’s not like she was tortured in her room, locked in without food and no bed.
“Meika was a spoiled child. Meika was the most spoiled child of them all four kids. She was so spoiled, she was the most spoiled child in the family.”
The conversation, played in court by Crown prosecutor Susan Pepper with Det. Mike Cavilla on the witness stand, occurred shortly after the couple were told by a Child and Family Services official that their story that Meika Jordan had fallen down stairs did not match the gravity of the girl’s injuries.
Both stepmother Magoon, 25, and father Jordan, 28, are on trial for first- degree murder in the death of the girl who succumbed at Alberta Children’s Hospital on Nov. 14, 2011, from injuries sustained over the previous three days.
“She fell downstairs and I know that,” Magoon added.
In another surreptitiously taped phone call on Nov. 30, 2011, Jordan admitted to his wife that he was paranoid police and Child and Family Services were continually pointing fingers at them.
“I’m paranoid, it’s like everybody is going out to get us,” Jordan tells her, after police released a media statement with the girl’s name and saying her death was a homicide.
Magoon, laughing, replied: “You watch too much TV.”
Jordan later told Magoon it’s good to have a story about what happened, but he planned to get a lawyer and would not be talking to the cops. He insisted that police would need virtually 100 per cent in evidence to convict either of them and if he got three per cent, there would be reasonable doubt.
It wasn’t until after an eightmonth undercover operation, that ended in October 2012 with confessions to officers purporting to be with a criminal organization, that police laid charges.
Magoon, who had initially said the girl burned her hand on a hairstraightening iron, admitted she had burned the girl’s hand with a lighter for more than a minute. She also admitted in the undercover operation other physical and mental abuse of the girl and pointed at Jordan for even worse abuse.
As well, she told a friend in Regina in a wiretapped phone conversation in December 2011 that she had been playing a game with Meika in which she poured lighter fluid on the girl’s hand, then lit the fluid.
“I’m going to be honest, but please don’t share this with anyone,” Magoon told the friend. “It’s me who burned her by accident. This magic trick, when you take a lighter, put gas in your hand and light it. It’s a big flame and, well, she wanted so much to do it. I said we can’t do it because it’s hot.”
Jordan admitted in a later call with Magoon that he was alone with the girl on Nov. 12, 2011, and the girl struck her head twice. He said he was playing with Meika, sliding her across the floor and she hit her head. But he didn’t know how she suffered three other blows to her head that would have caused fatal injuries. Magoon said, “honestly Spence, who could have done that?” The calls came during a voir dire related to the undercover operation. Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Rosemary Nation must eventually rule if it is admissible.
The trial continues.